white christmas

Garrison Keillor, sometimes you and I agree. And sometimes you and I do not.
But I always agree with you on being Minnesotan.

I dream of a white Christmas, to be perfectly honest. As I write this, it is mid-December, my lawn in St. Paul is green, the streets are dusty, the sky is blue, there is a mention of snow flurries in the forecast, and by the time you read this, we may be swathed in snowdrifts, windowpanes frosted, trees flocked with white, the classic designer Christmas. But we Midwesterners are brought up to expect the worst, and so I anticipate that we will get rain on Dec. 24 and will walk to church under umbrellas and sing "O Little Town of Bethlehem" in a sanctuary smelling of pine boughs and wet wool.
It's Minnesota. We should have enormous drifts, requiring the Border Patrol to take to their skis to patrol the Boundary Waters wilderness and keep Canadian frostbacks from sliding down with their toboggans full of cheap pharmaceuticals. This is what we're here for, to keep the rapacious Canuck at bay despite heavy snows.
When people ask you where you're from and you say Minnesota, they don't say, "Oh, I loved the Minnesota Orchestra's recent recording of Beethoven symphonies" or "Robert Bly changed my life." No, they say, "It gets cold there, doesn't it?"

Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.